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Carson-Era Humor, Post-Colbert

This year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was held Saturday night, and everywhere you looked in the ballroom at the Hilton Washington lame ducks were taking wing.

President Bush, a man who can be very funny when he wants to, was in no mood after the massacre at Virginia Tech last week and the ongoing one in Iraq. Rich Little, the Carson-era comedian and impersonator, was wheeled in to help the audience forget last year’s debacle when Stephen Colbert opened both barrels on all parties, briefly bringing the proceedings some cultural relevance.

And of course the Washington media — the cream of American journalism, the people who bring you live reports from the lawn of the White House or serious-sounding backgrounders from deep inside the administration — was in attendance. Last year, Mr. Colbert looked across the sea of tuxedos and referred to the members of the press as “clowns.”

Because he failed to acknowledge both the propriety and the primacy of the establishment press, Mr. Colbert bombed inside the room, drawing disapproving looks from all quarters and little initial coverage. But in the days following his performance, the normally prosaic C-Span feed of the event was viewed approximately 2.7 million times in just 48 hours on YouTube.

This year, the correspondents’ association decided to regain custody of the event, sending out the message that it values Washington as it used to be, a maypole for policy and power, even as the next generation of consumers gathers more news and information from outside the mainstream media.

Mr. Little, a one-man time machine, obliged by dialing the room back decades to a time when Uncle Walter told us that’s the way it is, Johnny Carson tucked us all in and a bit about Richard Nixon singing “My Way” was considered naughty fun. A painful piano ditty that would not pass muster in the Catskills made fun, not of the president, but of something we can all get behind: Osama bin Laden’s turban. “And you thought Colbert was bad,” Mr. Little said after one particularly acute miss.

“Last year was a complete accident,” said Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic. “The organizers had no idea what they were getting. They knew that Colbert was hot, that ‘the kids liked him,’ but they were completely blindsided by the performance.”

It wasn’t just this year’s entertainment that had the faint whiff of mothballs. The correspondents’ dinner, with its formal attire, pretty frocks and celebrity guests, is Washington’s version of the Oscars. But this year, it felt as though all the movies were from the 1950s.

The stabs at pop cultural salience, like a mailed-in video top-ten list from David Letterman and the presence of C-listers like actors from “Reno: 911!,” only seemed to emphasize the distance between Washington and the rest of the country. The advertisers, a big part of the reason the event remains frantically attended, got a nice mix of celebrity and wonkery, but the dinner had the feeling of an artifact, not of a contemporary event.

Of course, outside the confines of the cozy dinner, many of the attendees are doing important work that has had profound effects on both the public discourse and the current administration. And even though some of that work was cited in awards given out Saturday night, that’s not what the evening was about.

Christopher Hitchens, the writer and Vanity Fair columnist, walked out of the dinner at about the time Mr. Little got around to his Ronald Reagan impression.

“The event was disgraceful, so lame and mediocre that it is beyond parody,” he said later. “It is impossible to decide which is more offensive: the president fawning over the press or the press fawning over the president. It expresses everything that the public means when they talk about inside-the-Beltway and access journalism.”

Mr. Hitchens didn’t storm out of the city. He stormed back to his house, where he co-hosted (along with fellow Vanity Fair contributor Todd Purdum and former Clinton aide Dee Dee Myers) the magazine’s post-dinner party, a much sought-after ticket.

Mr. Hitchens, a one-time pariah for his support of the Iraq invasion and his savaging of Mother Teresa, still serves as something of a social arbiter in Washington. And following the strange-bedfellows theme, Paul Wolfowitz, the embattled World Bank president, was chatting amiably in a roomful of journalists at Mr. Hitchens’ home.

It was juxtapositions like those that gave the evening a nostalgic air, a deliberate throwback to the age when politicians and journalists could be friends (or at least friendly) and when NBC and CBS ruled the airwaves, telling the country how to think about the world.

It’s a comfortable version of the status quo, but it’s running up against another version where Stephen Colbert helps set the news agenda every bit as much as Charles Gibson does. The Washington reverently observed in “The West Wing” is now mostly seen in the rear view.

In an attempt to set the tone for the evening, Steven Scully of C-Span and current president of the correspondents’ association said, “Let us be reminded that an adversary is not the same as an enemy, nor does an evening of civility mean we are selling out.”

But the world outside the Beltway is becoming far less civil. Unlike elected Washington, the members of the press are not facing term limits or an impending vote. But if consumers continue to exercise their right to get news when and where they feel like it, the press may eventually get voted out all the same.